I decided on making a useless side project. The reason? I needed a win and a distraction and it is just something that bubbles up every once in a while.

What is it?

Well the project is making palette for all kinds of niche/esoteric platforms. Like make one for Windows 3.11, YSMenu for the Nintendo DS or MS-DOS. Those types of situations where you have to use the platform, I like it to be personalised. It is really difficult to make it all cohesive. This is because for example for Windows 3.11, you only have 8-bit 256 colors. However that relies on dithering and on a modern monitor dithering does not do the same as on a CRT monitor for example.

CRT and AI

I tried asking some AI LLMs out there (Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT and the like) if you can have a VM running Windows 3.11 emulate a CRT monitor. Options that came back were pipe the video output into ffmpeg, no it is not possible and use VBoxManage to control the framebuffer output, maybe script it with Python.

Of those mentioned, one kind of worked. I did record my session from VirtualBox, then pipe it into ffmpeg with some filters and streamed that into VLC. It showed me some nice video and it worked albeit with a slight delay, but I thought there has to be a better way. Luckily for me there are more emulation setups our there, then just VirtualBox. I looked at DosBox and DosBox-X etc, but it did not allow me to do simple things to the video output.

Then I remembered PCem as a project. It was very difficult to get going. I could not compile it and I gave up on this. I did not want to spend my time fixing compiler errors in my spare time. Props to them for making an awesome emulator, but I cannot get it to work in a jiffy on Linux.

Then somebody mentioned 86Box, and I remembered that one as well. I had all those things already bookmarked, but never was able to actually work on it.

86Box to the rescue

Well it was not easy to get this one going, but at least they supplied a working binary out the gate. I downloaded a release, then the mandatory romset and nothing worked yet. Turned out you also need a nice manager to run everything. I went with 86BoxManager that could run cross platform.

Now I had my manager that could create VMs and then I could configure that to be hyper specific. That is so overwhelming. I just tried to get going, and I got a working system after clicking around just a bit. I installed MS-DOS 6.22 first and then went on installing Windows 3.11.

This was grand. I felt like I was right back in my childhood again, just clicking away in Windows 3.11. Barely understanding what I was doing but I could open Paint and I could change the way everything looked and I could run a calculator on my machine.

Back then I already fell in love of personalizing the computer. That was one of my first creative outlets I think. I always love tinkering with the settings, seeing what looked nice and trying out stuff.

I also recently learned there is such a thing as #DOSCember so maybe next year I will participate.

CRT

Okay but now the story isn't ready yet, because I needed CRT. Well there exist another great wonderful project from libretro. It contains all the shaders you ever wanted to make something emulate something else. Lots of people contributed their best versions of what they think is the best one.

The moment I applied on the shaders to my machine that sort of worked, was this one, it immediately looked better. It felt like home. The colors blended already nicely. The contrast with the modern looking VirtualBox I had running alongside it was stark indeed.

Conclusion

I am just happy I live in an age where I can relatively easily go back in time to my childhood and try out things again. I can also close off certain chapters again, by completing some task I might have had in my head for years on end.

Also AI is nice and all, but it definitely has its limitations. Sometimes you just got to work stuff out yourself.